Business & Market Intelligence

Managers Say the Majority of Information Obtained for Their Work Is Useless: Accenture Survey

Middle
managers spend up to 2 hours a day searching for information to do their
jobs, and more than 50% of the information they obtain has no value to
them, according to results of a recent Accenture survey.

Only half of all
managers believe their companies do a good job in governing information
distribution or have established adequate processes to determine what data
each part of an organization needs.

Key
findings of the Survey:

59%
saidthat as a consequence of poor information distribution,
they miss information that might be valuable to their jobs almost
every day because it exists somewhere else in the company and they
just can’t find it.

42%
of respondents said they accidentally use the wrong information at
least once a week,

53%
said that less than half of the information they receive is valuable.

45%
of respondents said gathering information about what other parts
of their company are doing is a big challenge, whereas only 31% said
that competitor information is hard to get.

57%
of respondents said that having to go to numerous
sources to compile information is a difficult aspect of managing
information for their jobs. In
order to get information about competitors, customers, project
responsibility or another department, respondents said they have to go
to three different information sources, on average.

40% of
respondents said that other parts of the company are not willing to
share information

36% said
there is so much information available that it takes a long time to
actually find the right piece of data.

Part
of the difficulty lies in the way managers are gathering and storing
information. For example, the majority of managers in the survey
said they store their most valuable information on their computer or
individual e-mail accounts, with only 16% using a collaborative workplace
such as a company’s intranet portal.

The
proliferation of different information sources within organizations was
revealed by the survey as the most important reason why managing
information is proving difficult.

“The
findings show that companies are failing to get the right information to
their employees,” said Royce Bell, CEO of Accenture Information
Management Services (AIMS). “People and organizations cannot keep
up with the volume of information produced by technological innovation.
Managers in particular are having great difficulty navigating a
rapidly expanding sea of information, and the situation is only getting
worse.”

Survey
Methodology: The Web-based
survey of 1,009 managers in companies in the United States and United
Kingdom with reported annual revenues of more than US$500 million was
fielded in June 2006. The purpose of
the online survey was to uncover wide-ranging insights about the way
managers gather, use and analyze information.